Student Learning Objectives for Principals

Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) are intended to reinforce the good practice that many educators already embrace, where school leaders, teachers and other instructional staff examine their students’ strengths and areas for growth, set grade-level and school-wide goals for students, and gauge their progress towards those goals. The SLO process simply formalizes this practice.

SLOs enable a stronger connection between individual and collective improvement practices of school leaders and teachers as they work together to develop goals and strategies that bring school improvement to scale.

SLOs also help guide data-driven instruction, provide an anchor for collaborative planning and promote student-learning focused dialogue between principals and their ILT teams and between principals and their ILEDs. All school leaders will have a minimum of one SLO for SY 2017-18. This includes new principals, school leaders who have been PEP’d as principals, managing assistant principals, and interim principals.

Current principals who wrote an SLO for SY 2016-17 HSA will have this SLO incorporated in this year’s SY 2017-18 School Leader Effectiveness Evaluation

It is essential that SLOs are based on high-quality assessments in order for the process to yield accurate and meaningful results. City Schools has identified quality assessments for most courses and content areas for which principal SLOs can be written. This will ensure consistency across the district and reduce the burden of assessment design and selection on principals and ILEDs.

In addition, given the timing of when assessment results are available and in line with the district assessment strategy, principals should write a SLO either for mathematics or for literacy. The SLO target should address as many students in the school as possible. Finally, principals should differentiate their SLOs to reflect the varied starting places and learning levels of their students.

Additional information about principal SLOs – including updates to the approval and final scoring rubrics, process timelines, and roles and responsibilities – is available in the SY 2017-18 Principal SLO Guidebook. This resource is also available in your Principal SLO org on Blackboard (TSS).